glass_jaws

Random things:

DId you know you could disease reapers? I didn't. I found that cackle fever was a nice reaper CC on the DA lives.

There are enemies that will recast death ward instantly even while stunned/paralyzed/etc. Very annoying that you dispel it while they are CCed, and it immediately comes back up.

Well finally done with the Dragonlord past lives, and have switched into a Dark Apostate on my main. I would have loved to stay Dragonlord to be honest, but I expect it will get nerfed into the ground soon. It is just too good as is.

Anyway Dark Apostate has been both fun and frustrating.

Good:
* Well this is mostly about Death domain, not Dark Apostate per say. Huge Necro dc boosts, great SLAs. Immunity to energy drain is redundant with Dark Apostate undead form, but if you don't run that it's good.
* The 200% scaling Harm spell in the T5 is a lot of fun, especially for self healing. 5% spellcrit for a few classes of spells is nice in the T5 too (plus more necro boosts)
* Overall damage is pretty good for leveling assuming you can hurt them (see ugly below)
* Good synergy with the Divine Disciple tree (probably better than the Dark Apostate tree overall, but you really want some of the DA T5s)
* Does surprisingly well fighting most undead with a bit of light power, plus autodestroy on turn undead (if you take it)

Bad:
* Several of your abilities are not consistent and/or bugged. The evil damage from Bane/Prayer/etc does not trigger some abilities like extra spellpower when casting alignment spells, but if you crit with them, it will trigger spellpoints on crits with alignment spells.
* Your evil damage doesn't work on a large number of champions and other enemies. Based on my testing, every enemy in this list is "immune" (you don't actually get an immune message). https://ddowiki.com/page/Mind_Block
* Enemies that cast mass death ward instantly when you walk in a room suck for a long time. I feel like Magus of the Eclipse mantle is absolutely required for this build since it has the only functional dispel magic in the game.

Ugly:
* Oh boy do I hate Iron Golems (and other constructs) on this build. With the inability to curse them, you can't get your decent evil damage on them. You can't use necro power on them. You can't use fire on them. I ended up having to skip Epic Von4 this life because I couldn't deal with the iron golems. With the lack of groups on top of that, this is nearly a game breaker for playing this build. There are entirely too many things immune to negative and clerics don't really get spells that can deal with them effectively. It got so bad I was almost tempted to take Macrotechnic and get the rust damage upgrade on it's strike. *sigh*
* Another big issue is liches and things like the Wizking that are immune to 6th level and under spells. Clerics have so few spells that actually do anything past level 6 that you are on a huge cooldown while waiting to try to nuke these guys again. While not quite as bad as iron golems (since you can at least use fire) it does add a very aggrevatingly long time to boss kills.

Now I am only level 28 so far. I have't tried to run my Reapers yet at cap. I suspect I am going to have a very horrible time in Sharn, and Ravenloft at minimum due to the Iron Golems.

Overall while I want to try to make this work as my main, I gotta give it a 6 out of 10 just due to the bugs, and inability to really do any dungeon with constructs well.

One suggestion I would have for SSG is allow bestow curse to land on constructs, etc once you have the 4th core in Dark Apostate. This would let us do our evil damage and at least give us a small tool to help bring them down. Honestly I think the curse should do an immunity bypass to allow 50% of the necrotic damage to land (not 100% bypass). That would allow the DA to at least use their higher level spells to damage stuff.

Well got to 32 on my first dragonlord build last night. I gotta say I am having a blast with it.

Pros:
1. Strong CC (with bonus helpless damage when they get CCed) and tactics DCs
2. Auras (if you build for them in the tree) provide some good utility to the Dragonlord. If you have the right party makeup they can be beneficial to others
3. Strong features like displacement, immunity stripping, trances and dragon leap provide a well rounded package
4. Supports all weapon styles/types. So many trees are built for specific weapon styles/types, so I really like the universal support here.
5. Enhancement tree seems to be built to support multiclassing with some very strong low hanging fruit
6. DPS is high for Dragon Lord/Ravager combo. It might be higher than base fighter with the extra melee power from Ravager added in

Cons:
1. Reckless Devotion is pretty bad. It is a long cast, with a very short range first of all. Second the character locks in place while using it. Minor nitpick, but it would be nice to be able to use this on yourself just to remove the status effects without having to use your second wind but that would just be icing on the cake for the class.
2. The graphical circle for the aura is just a bit over the top. Hopefully they tone that down some. I didn't mind it when I only had the first aura, but as it grew as you added auras its just too much.
3. Cruel Cut is broken good in heroics, doing hundreds of con damage (dual wield hits twice with it, and it seems doublestrike doubles the con damage as well). When you hit epics, the ability pretty much stops working. While I don't think it should be as good as it is in heroics there, I kinda wish there was a middle ground and it continued to work in epics some. That said, it's a minor thing in the overall package.
4. Ravager core three is still just meh. Having to roll a nat 20, then having the enemy fail a DC 20 will save isn't going to happen very often. Heck even at level six when you can get it, getting an enemy to fail DC 20 isn't going to happen. This core needs to be updated to scale, probably off your intimdate score since Ravager now has these built in intimidate mechanics (with the instakill, etc). All that said, the passive stats on the core is fine so maybe this isn't worth the squeeze.
5. If you aren't going to take the Dragonlord tree for some reason, the auras are pretty useless. You really need those Dragonlord cores to buff the auras to a decent measure. Just a little weird interaction with the base class and the enhancement tree there. It would be nice to give the Dragonlord the choice of aura vs feat in those levels instead of forcing the aura and removing the feat. That said, again it's not a huge deal.

Bug that I know of:
1. Festering Wound dot does not seem to scale off melee power.
2. Reckless Devotion healing doesn't seem to be scaling.
3. Laughter is not procing when using Slaughter.

Overall I give Dragonlord a 9.5 out of 10. Yes it is that fun to play and the majority of the cons above are a very minor thing in comparison. I know there is a perception that it might be too strong. I don't have enough experience in the higher end content with it yet to say for sure. I am also playing a triple completionist that has 136 reaper points with it at the moment, so my perception is very skewed with all that extra power. I have soloed some R6s with it so far, and it is probably the easiest melee solo in those I have seen. Generally I don't like to solo melee in Reaper due to the lack of control, etc so Dragonlord fits my playstyle a lot better since I tend to prefer caster control overall.

That image lol.